I apologize for being gone for a time. A short stint studying to become a Mechanical Engineering Technician, followed by a new job forced B.Howe & Family to take a short sabbatical. Well, things are beginning to sort themselves out around here, and we hope to be back on track shortly. In the meantime, I wanted to let you know that you haven’t been forgotten. Here is a project that kind of blind-sided me last week. But it’s quick and easy, so I thought I’d pass it along to you.

As a woodworking hobbyist you sometimes run into strange requests. My wife recently came home from a trip and presented me with a crock pot saying that I was to turn it into a butter churn. What could I do? Since I already had the pot, all I needed was the beater and lid.

It should be said that I don’t know anything about churning butter. The basic idea is to beat milk around until the fatty bits clump together. This can be done by simply shaking a mason jar partly filled with milk, or using a mixer with only one beater installed. There are many types of churns and information is readily available online.

The paddle consists of nothing more than two crossed pieces of wood mounted on the end of the dowel. To fix the paddles to the dowel, I chose to use a hardwood wedge.

The lid is fashioned from a 3/4″ thick piece of pine. I cut the shape to fit the outside of the pot, then routered the edge to allow it to sit into the pot a little. A hole slightly larger than the dowel was cut in the middle.

To finish the wood, it will be wiped with several coats of mineral oil.

And that is it. A simple and quick project that allowed me to get back into the shop and get sawdust up my nose.

If you’d like more information on making butter, here is a link to start you off: How to Use a Butter Churn”. There is a lot of information out there.

Watch for more to come in the near-future, and thanks for sticking around.

This year I decided that the eaves on my house needed some attention. They had bends, kinks, and cracks which just couldn’t be ignored any longer. I thought about hiring a contractor to take care of it, but then I thought what a wonderful opportunity to try out the DIY Vinyl Eavestrough I have been seeing around the hardware stores. It would be a fun project for me and &Family to tackle, and we may even save a few bucks.

So, after a little research online, it was off to the hardware store. The instructions I had found made it sound pretty easy, all the pieces just lock together and hang from clips which get screwed into the fascia. We played around in the eaves section trying to figure out which of the vinyl pieces went with what. There are a few different systems, and a few different sizes. BE CAREFUL! We had to go back a couple days later, because different sized hangers had been mixed into the same box and we hadn’t noticed while counting them out.

The first thing you’ll notice, is that the price of the eavestrough is really low. Then you’ll discover that each hanger is going to cost you $3-5 or more. And finally, the downspout attachments get up around $15. A little quick math and you’ll probably find that the contractor is starting to look good.

We take our materials home and get ready to start the back of the house. I rip down the old eaves with extreme prejudice, and a little too much glee, then the kids get all the soffets and fascia cleaned up and repainted.

My research told me that we wanted a drop of 1/8″ for every 10′ of eave, so we figured out our drop, marked each end of the house and ran a chalk line. We then had to screw all the hanger clips in place. The website said every 24″, but those clips are expensive so I was hoping to get away with every 30″. (This turned out to be a bad idea – on the front of the house I went back to 24″) As we put the hanger clips up, we were also assembling the eavestrough. End caps were installed, they just pop on, then the hangers were slid into place. The hangers must be slid onto the eavestrough from an open end. Then it was a simple matter to line the hangers up with the clips and snap it into place.

The second piece of eavestrough connected to the first with a two-piece coupler. One piece outside, the other inside, and then lock together when you have the two eavestrough sections lined up. The coupler is pre-caulked and seems to form a good seal.

At the downspout location we screwed the downspout adapter directly to the fascia and the eavestrough simply slid into one end of it. There are marks inside which are labeled with temperatures. You want to place it so that the end of the trough is lined up with the approximate temperature at that time. These placement marks allow for proper contraction/expansion of the vinyl as the seasons change.

The downspout was pretty simple. Clips are screwed into the wall, and downpipe pieces are cut and attached with elbows to get the shape required.

All-in-all it was a pretty easy system to work with. But there are problems which I didn’t discover until later.

Problems, Mistakes and Warnings:1) Cost: This may be an affordable method if someone was putting eaves on a doghouse or shed, but for use on your house I would strongly advise hiring the contractor. It’ll actually end up cheaper in the end.2) Lack of proper instructions: I didn’t see anything at the store, the staff were of no help (who really expects them to be?), only a few little blog pages like this one to try and gleen info from.3) Clip Spacing: This is critical – no more than 24″. Vinyl is very flexible, and when the trough fills up with water the wider gaps between the hangers allows the side to bow out and spill the water. In one instance it bowed enough to pop free of the clips. 4) Downspouts: The pieces are just held together by a screw, just like with metal downspouts. Be very aware of screw placement. It will catch every little leaf if it is in the wrong place. I suggest putting the screw on top of any slanted pieces.5) Downspout elbows: They have an arrow on them which point in to direction of water flow. Pay attention to them.6) Clogging: They will clog on the smallest things. Definitely plan on using the gutter guards – which I should note, are very expensive and you’ll need a lot of them to actually cover your eaves.7) Pitch: The angle they suggest is simply not steep enough. With 60′ across my house we dropped 3/4″ from end to end at the back of the house. Along with using too few hangers, we end up with water standing in the trough after a rain. I increased it slight for the front, up to 1″ drop, used enough clips, and the eavestrough completely drains.

And my biggest complaint and the Most Important when planning:8) Drip Edges: The original drip edge on your roof is probably set almost flush with the fascia. This is because metal eavestrough is nailed directly to the fascia leaving no gap between. The Vinyl Eavstrough has a clip and hanger behind the actual trough. This means that there is a 3/4″ gap and when it rains the water will run off the drip edge and straight to the ground behind the eavestrough. To fix this I had to install a second drip edge about an inch further out on top of the first, while still making sure to be under the roofing tiles. Not an easy job, and even more cost.

Overall Opinion: It is easy to work with. It performs the job I believe it was intended for. It should only be used for very small projects where hiring a contractor is just too expensive. On bigger jobs, like your house, it is far cheaper, faster, easier, and longer lasting to hire the contractor and install metal eaves. So put it on your shed, it’s a great weekend project. Don’t put it on anything bigger unless you have a lot of money to burn.

Update: We lived with the wide clip spacing on the back of the house long enough. During long slow rains there was little problem, but we don’t seem to get those anymore. Over the past year it has only seemed to rain heavily for shorter periods of time. This resulted in beautiful waterfalls pour down beside the house wherever the eaves decided to flex and spill. We couldn’t take it any more, so this past weekend we ripped the eaves down and added clips in between the existing ones. That means we now have clips every 18″. While it hasn’t been tested by torrential downpours yet, we can already see that the eave is straighter than before – much less sag. We are hoping for much better performance when mother nature decides to start soaking us again.

One of the things that amazes us about the game of chess, is the array of people who play it. We have met five-year-olds, who know the basics, and yet their parents don’t know the first thing about the game. There is the smartly dressed business person enjoying a congac and a game with a colleague, or the grease monkey who crawls out from under a beat up old car to make their next move. Kids pick it up in school from friends, teachers, and Harry Potter. It is played all over the world, and by people from every walk of life. This is just amazing.

Equally amazing is what people will do with the game to make it their own. Which brings us to today’s topic: Beer Chess. There are as many variations to this game as there are players, but I’ve posted some general rules below. It can be played with shot glasses full of beer as the pieces, or simply using the cans as pieces. There is a suggested board setup below, but just use your imagination. Megachess.com has a set of plastic tops for beer cans, and we are working on a cedar version to match our chess peices and board.

Now, in our mind, what can be better than a sunny afternoon spent on the back deck, with good friends, a barbecue, and a few intense games of Beer Chess.

Cheers everyone!

Boston Beer Chess Rules

This was printed in the ‘Boston Half Baked’.
Beer Chess is chess played with beer as the pieces. Beer chess is the unification of the intellect with the inebriated. Beer chess is stimulating brain cells as you kill them. Beer chess was created during a weekend retreat at the McEnaney Estate in Jackman, Maine, thus making Jackman, Maine the Beer Chess capital of the universe.

PLAYING THE GAME
Beer chess is played with beer, a lot of beer. One side uses Light Beer (white), the other side uses regular (black) of the same brands. (see list below) Our research and development team has concluded that one can expect a standard Beer Chess game to last up to five hours, assuming neither player passes out. Intermissions, however, may be declared on a bilateral basis.

BOARD CONSTRUCTION
As you may have realized, this game requires a big board. While beer chess boards are now commonplace in Jackman, in other places their availability is still limited. Again, our R+D team has arrived at a clever solution: bathroom tiles-large white bathroom tiles. Placed on a darker table at regular intervals, one can quickly construct a professional looking Beer Chess set. For and even cheaper board, cardboard coasters, available at most bars, serve as impromptu, portable boards.

1. When one moves a piece, one must sip from the piece moved.
2. When one’s piece is captured, one must drink the entire piece.
3. Castling requires two sips: one from the King, one from the Rook
4. En passent requires only one sip (as in a standard pawn move)
5. When one’s pawn reaches the eighth rank, and is exchanged for a queen (or other piece), one’s opponent must drink the remainder of the pawn.
6. Once a piece is sipped, that piece must be moved. (taking back moves is not allowed)
7. One may take as long as one wants to drink a captured piece, but the piece must be quickly consumed when a second piece is captured.
8. After each exchange of pieces, the players must toast each other’s health with the exchanged pieces.
9. When one is put in check, one must sip from the King.
10. Passing out constitutes a resignation.
11. A player may not go the the bathroom before his move.
12. When one is checkmated, one must drink:
1) The remainder of one’s King
2) The remainder of opponent’s King
3) The remainder of one’s pieces.
(That’s a lotta beer)

GENERAL HINTS:
1. Take big sips out of pieces you expect to trade, when moving those pieces. This technique evenly distributes the amount of beer you will consume, and decreases the amount you will have to drink from that piece when it is traded or captured.

2. If you are a light drinker, avoid exchanges (especially if you are down a piece)

3. Avoid sacrificing pieces for position. A sacrifice will only force you to drink more. Remember, in this game, you can be beating your opponent, not only by the fact that you have a greater number of pieces left on the board, but also by the fact that you have a greater number of surviving brain cells left.

It’s spring, finally! And, one of the jobs which has to be addressed is cleaning out the coat closet. The parkas get cleaned and stored, the spring coats are brought out, and winter boots are traded for running shoes. It’s when digging out the boots that my wife starts to casually mention that we need a new shoe rack for the floor of the closet. Within a few days the comments become more of an ultimatum. So this is how you get this weeks blog. We’ll be building a shoe rack.

First we’ll measure the available space in the closet. Then it’s out to the shop to figure out what we’re going to do. There is a bunch of scrap oak left over from Rosemary’s Cupboard so we’ll use that. I want to avoid plywood, so the rack will have to be made of slats. A simple lap joint should hold the slats in place. Arbitrarily I chose 1.5″ as the width for all the pieces. And instead of being a single unit with two shelves, I’ll make two independent and stackable shelves, just in case we want to use them for something else. This is a one time job, so I’m not going to draw up a plan, just a quick sketch to help me visualize the finished product.

And here we go! The edges and slats for the tops are cut to length. In this case the edges are 43.5″ and 12″ long, and the slats are all 9.25″ long. Then a quick pass over the table saw to rip each piece down to 1.5″.

The Edges:

The edge pieces will need to be routered for the slats to overlap. Install a 5/8″ straight bit on the router, set 3/8″ high. Oak likes to splinter terribly, so to avoid problems make several shallow passes until the lap edge is 3/8″ deep. You probably already know this but set the fence for the first shallow pass, and cut all of the edge pieces. Then shift the fence back a bit and recut each edge piece, deepening the lap. Repeat this until the lap is deep enough on all the pieces. Switch out the router bit for a 1/4″ roundover bit, and rout all the corners except the lap.

The edge pieces then need a 45“ mitre at each end so we can make the frame out of them. To secure the corners, we drill pocket holes on the mitre and secure them with 1-1/2″ screws and glue.

The Slats:

Repeat the routering process with the straight bit as with the edge pieces, this time putting the lap on the ends of the slats. Use a piece of scrap as a push block to avoid tear out when the router exits the wood and as a way of maintaining the right angle as you move the slat across the bit. As before, do several shallow passes until the lap is 3/8″ deep. Switch the bits and roundover all other edges.

The Legs:

The legs are 5.5″ x 8″ pieces of oak. To make them look a little better, we cut a half circle out of the bottom with the band saw. We rounded over all edges which wouldn’t be in contact with the top or the ground. Then we added a couple of pocket holes which we will use to attach the legs to the top. As a final touch, we cut a couple small triangles which will be glued in place as a light brace.

Assembly:

Start with the top: Screw and glue the edge pieces together to create the top frame. To keep everything in place while setting the screws we use ratchet straps. These are just the ordinary webbed straps sold for cars, trailers, etc. and they are fantastic for clamping odd shapes or large pieces.

Evenly space the slats within the edge frame. I simply glued them down, but for a stronger joint you may want to secure them with a small brad or finishing nail.

Flip the top over. Position, screw and glue the legs in place on the short edges. Glue the light braces into place. Let the entire assembly dry up overnight.

Finishing:

Sand the entire piece and wipe clean with a cloth. Apply the stain of your choice and finish with a couple coats of Danish Oil.

Now you’re all set to shove your beautiful solid oak shoe rack into the deep recesses of your overstuffed closet where it will never be seen again, but you can be satisfied knowing that you produce a useful and beautiful object that will make your home a better place (if only subconsciously).

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns about this post please share them with us. Thanks for visiting.

I like getting the odd custom job to figure out, especially when it involves materials, equipment, or techniques which I haven’t used before. Just such an order was Rosemary’s Cupboard. During a visit a while back, Rosemary requested a cabinet to fit beside the fridge in her kitchen. We assessed the existing cupboards and measured up the space, then figured out what purpose the new cupboard was to serve. We were also able to take one of the existing cupboard doors home for style and color matching.

After a bit of sketching, and pondering, we came up with a relatively simple plan which would allow us to try a few new things. The PDF of our sketch plan is available for download. It is not by any stretch of the imagination a complete plan of the project as I tend to do a lot of work in my head rather than on paper. But, it’ll give you the basic idea of what I was after. This design relied on european-style hinges, drawer sliders, and rail & stile router bits. [This means we had to go buy some more tools from Lee Valley– Yaay!]

The Body

The body of the cupboard is easy. It’s just a simple box. 3/4″ oak plywood for the sides, top, bottom, center, and the toekick/base. 1/2″ oak plywood for the back. The spacers, and crossers were each cut from 3/4″ oak plywood, the spacers being affixed to the sides prior to assembling the rest of the body. Holes for the adjustable shelf pegs were also drilled. Then the rest of the pieces were glued and nailed into place. The 3/4″ plywood crossers being placed last.

Shop Tip: The hardwood plywoods like to splinter when being cut. Masking all cut lines with painters tape will reduce this a little, but to ensure good clean cuts invest in a proper cabinetry/plywood saw blade. Unfortunately, they can run from $85 to $150 but are totally worth the investment, saving you time and waste from bad cuts.

Solid oak trim pieces were cut to create the face of the cupboard body. These pieces will dress up and hide the plywood edges and make for clean edges. My original plan was to drill pocket holes and screw these pieces together before attaching to the rest of the body, but I could be more accurate by just gluing and nailing to the plywood directly.

This basically finished the body. I would like to note the small indent at the back of the toekick. This solves a small pet peave I have with most purchased cabinets – getting around the baseboards. Why should the cabinet have a huge gap behind it? Anyhow, on to the shelves.

Adjustable Shelves

The holes were drilled in the sides during the body assembly, so all that was left here was to make the shelf itself. It is just a piece of 3/4″ oak plywood with a 3/4″ piece of solid oak trim on each side. The trim again hides the plywood edge, but also gives it a little extra strength to resist sagging across the 43.5″ span. One shelf is made for the bottom cupboard, two are made for the top.

The Drawers

Basically there are two drawers here. One is roughly 6″ deep, while the other has no depth at all being just a pull-out shelf. Lets look at the pull-out shelf first.

It is nothing more than a piece of 3/4″ oak plywood. The drawer slides are attached on either side and a faceplate is fashioned from a piece of solid oak to cover the opening. The faceplate is attached with screws through the front. Plugs are fit into the screwholes after finishing.

The 6″ drawer consists of 3/4″ oak plywood sides and a 1/2″ oak plywood bottom. Dadoes were cut into the sides to receive the bottom piece. The drawer slides are attached to either side and a faceplate fashioned of solid oak. The faceplate this time can be attached with screws on the inside of the drawer.

The Doors

This, I was expecting to be the hard part. Each door required two rails (top and bottom), two stiles (left and right), and a 1/4″ oak plywood panel for the center. The rails and bottom stile were cut from 1″x4″ oak, while the top stile came from a 1″x6″ oak piece. I cut a template for the top stile, traced it onto a 1″x6″ piece and rough cut the curve on the band saw. Then it was time to play with the router and the new rail & stile bits. If you’ve never used them, this is a two bit set where one bit is used to create the inside profile, while the other creates the counter-profile so that the stiles will butt cleanly against the rails. The top stile was my main concern so I started there. The bits have bearing wheels so they will ride against a template and act as a trim bit while shaping the edge. I taped my template to the rough cut piece and routered the inside edge. While this bit was in place I slid the other stile and rails through it. I set the other bit in the router and profiled the ends of the stiles. It was very important to use a sacrificial push block here, as the oak chips like crazy near the ends. Test fitting the pieces was truly satisfying as they locked tightly together.

The panel was cut from 1/4″ oak plywood. It slides into a groove created by the rail & stile bits, so very little had to be done to it. The curve only needed to be rough cut on the bandsaw. All the pieces were put together, the joints of the rails and stiles were glued, but the panel was left to float. Clamps were applied and the doors were left to cure for the night.

The Hinges

The last structural component. The european style hinges are again, remarkably easy to install. They have a bit of a tolerance for error, and are easy to work with. Do some research before buying them though. Aside from different hinges opening at different angles (I used 107° overlay frameless ), there are different hinges for how your door is going to sit on the frame (overlay, offset, inset), and for the type of frame your mounting on (face frame, frameless). Once you have the correct hinge just follow the instructions. For mine, I drilled a 1-3/8″ hole with a forstner bit into the rail of the door and mounted a small clip onto the body of the cupboard for each hinge. When they were all in the right place, I just needed to hold the door up and clip the hinge pieces together. A few small adjustments to small screws on the hinges made sure that the doors were hanging straight and properly aligned.

Finishing

Of course, just when you get it all together and working you have to take it all apart to make it pretty. Everything was sanded starting with 100 grit and moving down to 200 grit. As an afterthought, all the doors and drawer faces received another pass on the router to put a Roman Ogee profile on the outside edges. In order to match the existing cupboards, all I needed to apply was a good coat of satin polyurethane. If you read my previous post regarding Spray Gun Fun then you know how that went.

And here it is, the completed cupboard. Everything works the way it is supposed to. It was all the correct dimensions. A quick trip to Innisfil to deliver and install it in Rosemary’s kitchen and we were finally done. The last thing we did was to install the anti-slam devices on the door hinges.

We are happy that with the way it worked out. It works very well. It fits the space, and brings a lot more storage to the kitchen. The construction was relatively easy, and yet it is quite attractive. If anyone has questions or comments regarding this cupboard or the techniques used in its construction, please do so below.

For quite some time we have been wanting to get a Spray Gun attachment for our compressor. We sometimes have large projects to put a finish on, and thought this would be the easiest way to go about it. Besides, the guys you see using them in videos and adverts are having so much fun and look so cool. Well, as it came to pass we got one for Christmas last year.

What we received was the ﻿﻿Critter Air-Powered Spray Gun from Lee Valley Tools, Ltd. Now, at first glance it isn’t very impressive. I mean it’s small, about the size of a cheap garden hose nozzle. It weighs about the same too. If the box didn’t include a Mason jar you would swear it was empty. But it only takes a second to realize that there are no cheap plastic parts, the nozzles and fittings are brass, and the stem is stainless steel. As always though, the proof of the pudding is in the eating ….

We had to wait a couple of months until we had a project of such sizable dimension as to warrant the use of the spray gun. We had been expecting to wait until warmer spring weather so that we could try it outside. However, Rosemary’s Cupboard came about and was just screaming for a coat of polyurethane.

Out came the gun, a quick read of the instruction sheet, grab a couple of mason jars and fill one with some leftover polyurethane from another job, fill another jar with paint thinner, grab a scrap piece of wood, fire up the compressor, stick the jar of urethane onto the gun, connect the air hose, OMG we were having so much fun, just like those guys in the adverts …

Now, it should be stated that for safety reasons the follow is advised:

Work in a Well Ventilated Environment – the sprayer essentially atomizes the liquid you are applying to the material, and a lot of it will remain airborne reaching dangerous levels very quickly,

Be Aware of the Fire Risk – if the finish you are using is flammable, it will be even more so when it is airborne, sparks, cigarettes, open flames should be extinguished or removed if there is any chance that they will come into contact with the airborne particles.

Of course, we didn’t have any of that ready. We knew we should, but that would take extra time and we wanted to play with the new toy.

So, standing there in our street clothes with only a dust mask for protection, we closed the doors to the workshop (didn’t want the sound of the compressor to bother the neighbours, and it was 4°C and raining outside), adjusted the pressure on the compressor, and pulled the trigger … nothing happened. A lot of air, bit no mist. We had started out with the compressor set to about 30 psi, but remembered that that was the setting for thin fluids, polyurethane is pretty thick so we would have to turn it up. We tried a few more times, raising the pressure with each go until we finally reached 70 psi and a beautiful, fine mist blew away from the gun at quite a fast rate, straight across my router table. Thank god we had thought to get the paint thinner out.

After cleaning off the router table, and throwing drop clothes over it, the table saw, shelves, and workbenches nearby, we tried again. This time we had it all right. It worked great. Nice clean lines, easy to control the spread, and the amount of spray. We felt that it was time to turn this on Rosemary’s Cupboard. This is where the gun surprised us the most. We had been testing a semi-gloss finish, but wanted to apply a satin to the cupboard. No problem. Fill another Mason jar with the satin polyurethane, take the semi-gloss off of the gun and put a cap on it, put the Mason jar of paint thinner on the gun and shake it around a bit to clean the stem, spray it into a waste bucket a few times to clear the nozzle, then swap that jar out for the satin finish, and we’re ready to go. It was really that easy!

The size of the cupboard allowed us to test the sprayer at a lot of angles. Vertical sides, tops and bottoms of shelves, even slopes when we had to lean the cupboard over to get at the top. It performed wonderfully the whole time. The coat apllied nice and even, without runs or streaks. After applying a coat to everything however, you couldn’t see the other side of the shop for all the polyurethane floating in the air, and it’s a small shop. That’s about the time we woke up and remember that we shouldn’t neglect basic shop safety.

While we were spraying we had heard my wife get into her car and drive off. She usually parks in front of the large shop door. I figured we could clear the air quicker by opening up both ends of the shop and letting the wind blow it all out. I threw open the back door, and depressed the button to lift the large door. The wind whipped past me picking up clouds of sawdust and depositing it on all the surfaces we had just sprayed, and blew all the floating polyurethane straight out onto the hood and windshield of my wife’s car. I guess, today she had chosen to take my van.

When the air was clear we closed the doors, cleaned up the gun, put everything away, and headed back into the house. A quick trip into the washroom to wash up, and I discovered why cover-alls, hats, and the other personal protective devices are so important. Every inch of exposed skin, every hair on my head and arms, my clothes, everything had a very thin coating of polyurethane. I looked like I was covered in a fine frost. Fortunately, it hadn’t properly set so getting it off was fairly easy. Had it been on there longer I would have been looking at a sponge bath in paint thinner. Not something I ever intend to try.

So it was an adventure. But these are the kind we like – if bad things didn’t happen we wouldn’t have any stories to tell.We’ll have to do a little extra sanding between coats, but nothing was ruined.

Over the next few days we would be applying several more coats. During these coats we experimented with adjusting the nozzle to deliver different amounts of fluid. We found it very easy to control, and after a little playing we found a pressure and nozzle setting which worked very well for the polyurethane. We were also very careful to wear the appropriate clothing and gear, and to ventilate the shop more carefully.

﻿﻿Critter Air-Powered Spray Gun Reviewed: 9 out of 10! It was amazingly easy to use and clean. It did everything it was supposed to. The Mason jars make everything so simple, and you don’t have to go out and buy a special paint bottle like most manufacturers make you do. Its light weight really becomes important after waving it around for an hour or so. There were only two problems we had (that were not our own fault). First, when you have the hose connected to the gun, you can’t sit it down – it’s too back heavy. We overcame this by clamping a short bar clamp to the underside of the worktable and hanging the gun over the bar (there is a little hook on top of the gun). Secondly, filling the Mason jars from a full 1 gallon pail was a bit of a pain. We ended up using a ladle, after spilling it all over the place on the first try. We’ll be looking around for a better way and let you know if we find something.

If there is one small trick you pick up along the way, let it be how to use a French Cleat. It is an amazingly strong, versatile, and easy mounting system for almost anything. We use them for hanging awkward pictures, window boxes, birdhouses, and odd and ends around the shop.

The concept is simple. Start with a strip of wood, 1″x3″ works pretty good. Put a 45° angle on your table saw blade and rip the strip of wood down the center. This will give you two roughly equal-sized pieces with a 45° bevel on one edge. One piece will be attached to the wall, the other gets attached to whatever your hanging up. Then just hook the pieces together as shown in the diagram at left. That’s about all there is to it. If you’re hanging a very long picture, you may want to mount another block near the bottom of the picture so that it hangs clean and straight.

To the right is a photo of a couple of our drying racks. We’ve mounted a long strip to the wall, and short strips to the racks. This way we are able to adjust the spacing of the racks to accomodate different sizes if necessary. We also have hangers for other purposes that will mount on this cleat, making it very functional and versatile.

These cleats are perfect for hanging cabinets or cupboards. First, you can level the cleat on the wall, without having to fight with the cabinet. Second, the cabinet is held in place while you secure it to the wall.

Here’s a nice video blog that uses the french cleat as the basis for an entire storage rack. http://lumberjocks.com/thewoodwhisperer/blog/11932 Well worth watching in my opinion, he has some good ideas and quickly demonstrates how easy french cleats really are.